SEEKING REDEMPTION WITH SON
Holt’s dad was victim of James’ abuse
Todd Holt hit the open road Wednesday and drove five hours through smoky skies and endless fields of golden wheat stalks dancing softly in the wind.
He’s 42 years old now, but can still vividly picture the start of a similar journey 26 years ago.
With his 16-year-old hopes, dreams and hockey gear packed into the back of his 1980 Pontiac Catalina, he pulled away from the family home in Estevan bound for Swift Current.
“I remember looking in the rearview mirror at my mom,” he says.
“I remember her crying and waving. And looking back, I don’t know if I ever brought that boy back. I went to see Graham James, and I was robbed of my dignity and everything from the first time I met this guy.”
Former NHL players Sheldon Kennedy and Theoren Fleury are the best known victims of Graham James. More anonymous is Holt — at least outside of Swift Current, where he is a local celebrity dating back to his days as a Bronco from 1989 to 1994.
Holt is in town to watch his son, Kaelan, audition for the Western Hockey League club. Kaelan just turned 18.
He arrives at camp as a speedy, undersized forward with good hands, just like his dad many years earlier, before things started to fall apart.
The Todd Holt story, in many ways, is made for Hollywood. A young hockey star ends up playing for a sexual predator. He drinks to the point of destruction. His life is spent numbing the pain until, one day, he finally tells the world what happened, which leads to criminal charges against his tormentor.
In the Hollywood version, he lives happily ever. But reality for survivors of sexual abuse often fails to follow such a promising story arc. The collateral damage inflicted by the likes of Graham James spans generations, and the healing journey follows no set timetable.
But as Holt arrives in Swift Current, he’s more at peace than he has been in a long time.
“I used to look at Swift Current as a place with ghosts, a scary place,” he says.
“But now it’s my second home. I gave 20 years of my life to the whole abuse situation. If I would have missed this opportunity, this experience, it would have been devastating all over again.”
By the time Holt arrived in Swift Current in 1989, Graham James had long since mastered the art of grooming victims for his abuse.
Holt was the perfect target. At 5-foot-6 and 155 pounds, he faced long odds of making it to the NHL. But James promised he could make it so. He had connections and, if Holt complied with his demands, he would use those connections to book his protégé’s ticket to the big time.
“He knew how to break you down emotionally,” Holt says. “You’re sitting in his office, and you think that he’s the one who made you score that hat trick — that it was him. It was the ultimate manipulation game he played, He’s like, ‘you’re too small. You’ll never make it without me. You’re not good enough.’?
On the ice, Holt filled the net and drove his opponents wild with trash talk that would have impressed his older cousin, Theoren Fleury. The fans in Swift Current adored the pint-sized agitator, voting him most popular player four years running.
On the road, fans hated him. “Theoren told me early on in my career, ‘If you go into a rink and they’re not screaming bloody murder at you, then you’re not doing your job,’ ” he says.
“When the fans were throwing stuff at me or screaming at me, then I knew I was doing my job.”
But Holt was more than an agitator. He still holds franchise records for goals (216), points (423) and games played (321).
After the San Jose Sharks selected him in the eighth round of the 1993 NHL entry draft, he returned to Swift Current for his overage season and piled up 40 goals and 87 points in just 40 games.
He’s a member of the Broncos Hall of Fame, his name engraved on a plaque at the entrance to the Credit Union iPlex along with the likes of Joe Sakic, Bryan Trottier and Tiger Williams.
But having his name called in the draft was as close as he’d get to the show.
Leaving Swift Current was easy; moving past it was almost impossible, as other victims of Graham James were coming to discover.
In 1996, while playing for the Birmingham Bulls of the East Coast Hockey League, Holt received word from his agent that Sheldon Kennedy was about to go public with allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of James. The agent gingerly asked Holt if he needed to know anything about his time playing in Swift Current.
“At that point of time, I was so confused,” Holt says. “I wasn’t ready. I thought I would take this to the grave. But you can’t. It will take you to the grave before you can ever take it.”
So Holt kept running from himself. Or trying to run. At 25, he went to Europe to prolong his hockey career. In Kafenberg, Austria, he scored an inconceivable 12 goals and eight assists in a single game. The following year, he returned to Estevan to be closer to his two young boys and took a job as maintenance worker at the Boundary Dam. It didn’t last. Nothing really did, as he bounced from job to job and address to address.
He drank. And he was too busy keeping his secret and fighting his past to focus on the present, which meant his two boys — Taysen and Kaelan — rarely saw him. Time and time again, over the years, Todd promised to watch their hockey games, to be in their lives. Time and time again, he fell short.
“Early on, I didn’t see my dad much,” Kaelan says. “I knew he had issues with alcohol and stuff like that, but I didn’t know what had happened to him.”
Meanwhile, the mother of his two boys, Jodie, moved on with her life and married a hard-working lad named Dan Pratt. “He was pretty young when he and my mom met, probably 22, 23 years old,” Kaelan says of his step-dad.
“For him, to come into a single mom’s life like that with two boys? I couldn’t say thank you enough times.”
Finally, in 2010, Holt hit a new low and reached out to Kennedy for help.
He moved to Calgary, entered rehab, and slowly came to realize he had to stop running from the ghost of Graham James.
So Holt went to the police and told them what happened. He told his family what happened. Then he told the world what happened, going to court in February 2012 to have a publication ban lifted on his name.
Telling the truth was a lifechanging step, Holt says, but only one step on the path to recovery.
“It doesn’t mean it’s over,” he says. “That’s when the hardest part is. For me, it was hard to look in the mirror and realize what I had done to the people I love the most.”
As part of his recovery, Holt set out to right the relationship with his two boys.
Kaelan noticed an immediate change.
“He started calling more, and he started paying more attention to me and my brother,” Kaelan says. “I didn’t know what to think at the time. I was sad, mad — a little bit of everything, I think.”
Kaelan says he’s proud of his dad for facing his demons — proud of him for helping other victims of sexual abuse. But trust, once lost, takes time to rebuild.
“To be honest, to this day, it’s still kind of tough because of what he did to us when we were little — just how many times he wasn’t there,” he says.
“We’ve reconnected a lot over the last couple of years, so it’s getting better. But it will still take a long time.”
Holt acknowledged the reconstruction process between father and son has only just begun.
“I am so grateful he had such a great step-dad,” Holt says. “He was really there for my boys. Kaelan and I are growing. We have an understanding. I know he didn’t like the man I was before.”
Holt is grateful for the second chance at being a dad.
“I regret that it took me so long to face things. But some people go through their entire lives trying to run ... That’s not the way I wanted my story to end,” he says.
“I was a good man. I just couldn’t find him. I had to make the appropriate change to get that man back. I have an opportunity at a second life instead of living in the abyss of self-pity that I was in.”
The man sitting in the stands today is determined to not let his experience go to waste.
He regularly receives phone calls and email messages from victims of sexual abuse, agonizing over the wisdom of going to the police — of telling their loved ones the truth.
“I didn’t have the prestigious NHL career of a Sheldon Kennedy or Theo Fleury. I’m just Todd, and maybe, I don’t know, some people might feel more comfortable approaching me,” he says.
“I know there are several players out there who haven’t said anything. We all have to find our own way to that point.”
For Kaelan, the next chapter is now. If he doesn’t make the Broncos, he has a backup plan to play for the Estevan Bruins of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League. Regardless, he intends to savour every moment in a Broncos uniform.
“It’s nerve-racking, for sure. I just need to play my game and score lots of goals,” he says.
“I won’t be able to top what my dad did, but I’ll try my best, for sure.”
And this time his dad is watching.